Mailchimp Woes Highlight Marketing Challenges For Marijuana Industry

A customer at a cannabis dispensary in Portland, Oregon. Marijuana brands have struggled to market their products through traditional means. (Photo by Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)

On Monday, a marijuana newsletter's account was temporarily suspended by the email marketing service Mailchimp.

Like others who work in digital media, Shea Gunther gets antsy about missing deadlines. When the Monday edition of MJToday Daily failed to send, he discovered that the email service had temporarily suspended his account.

It wasn't the first suspension Gunther had experienced. At the beginning of June, the content of his newsletter similarly tripped up Mailchimp's automated system, flagging his account. He said it took Mailchimp about two to three hours to fix the problem. "We had one of the highest performing newsletters they had ever seen," Gunther said.

Which is why he was surprised when it happened to him again this week.

"To their credit, once they actually looked at it, Mailchimp said, 'You have a legitimate [newsletter],'" Gunther said. "But [their] reliance on an automated system impacted my business for two days."

This time around, Gunther said, it took five to six hours for the company to remedy the issue. Representatives from Mailchimp assured him that they had taken steps to ensure that such a suspension wouldn't happen again.

(I also use Mailchimp for my cannabis newsletter, Word on the Tree, and have never experienced problems with sending it.)

As the marijuana industry continues to grow, the federal-state conflict in cannabis laws is causing marketing problems for companies within the industry. Marijuana businesses routinely have their Facebook ads rejected and their Instagram accounts shut down ― ostensibly for violating the services' policies against promoting illicit drugs.

But the marketing headaches affect even businesses that don't deal directly with the drug. "We don't do illegal stuff," said Gunther, whose newsletter features marijuana-related headlines from around the web. "It sounds like their system ... is not tuned to handle marijuana content. Everything we do is in compliance."

Perhaps one of the most aggravating aspects of the industry's social media challenges is the arbitrary nature of how such policies are enforced. It can be particularly frustrating for companies that spend resources on building up their social media followers, only to have their accounts shut down. Meanwhile, they watch their competitors continue to use the platforms with no consequences.

That's what happened for Manna Molecular Science. The company created a manufacturing process for a cannabinoid transdermal patch and licenses out the technology to its partners. Its patches can be found in multiple medical marijuana markets, including California, Massachusetts and Nevada.

Still, the company found that a newsletter to its partners failed to send earlier this year. But unlike Gunther's experience, Mailchimp informed the company that it would have to look elsewhere for an email marketing service when its digital marketing firm pushed back on the decision.

"Unfortunately, we consider cannabis products to be pharmaceutical in nature, which isn't supported under our Acceptable Use Policy," an email from Mailchimp read. "We have nothing personal against you or your business. … We have to ask that you seek a new vendor for your email marketing needs."

The response was befuddling to DeMena.

"It's definitely not a pharmaceutical product because it hasn't gone through the FDA, and we would never make that claim," he said. "We never felt that that was a real justification."

Mailchimp did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

DeMena doesn't understand why other companies in the space can continue using Mailchimp for their email newsletters. "We got no feedback from Mailchimp as to what it was that the bot found in our newsletter," he said. "This algorithm or bot doesn't flag Mary's Medicinals, and they make very similar products as us."

Indeed, Mary's Medicinals, a Colorado-based producer of medical marijuana products, has used Mailchimp to send emails to dispensaries and wholesalers. But the company mainly uses the service for its Mary's Nutritionals brand, which sells hemp-based products in all 50 states, its marketing and communications manager Elle Welch explained. Mary's hasn't had any issues using Mailchimp but has seen its Facebook and Instagram accounts shut down.

Manna Molecular now uses Benchmark Email.

In the end, such challenges simply come with the territory for businesses in the cannabis space. At best, they are a mild annoyance. At worst, they can seriously threaten businesses in an industry that lacks access to traditional advertising.

I'm a freelance journalist and the founder of Word on the Tree, a highly respected marijuana newsletter and website. My cannabis coverage has appeared in High Times, Vice, and Cannabis Now, among others. Before jumping on the weed beat, I covered media and tech for Mediabist...